The French, The Veil and The Look

The NY Times just ran this interesting piece on France's recent ban on the veil in public places. Some of the essays we have read this semester serve as great tools for understanding the potential for symbolic intervention that the veil may pose. And, perhaps, how feminists may appropriate it in a way that divorces it from its religious attachments. As the article notes, the veil "interrupts the circulation of coquetry" and reminds French people daily that the "civilizing mission" of its colonies has failed. Mostly, it allows women to "see out," without allowing anyone (men) to "see in." When Interior Minister Claude Guéant defends the principles behind the ban as "secularism" and "equality between man and woman," it's easy to see how threatening to the economy of the patriarchal look the veil is. We know that this claimed "equality" is actually one in which women are looked-at and man look at her (despite possible fissures). If the veil blocks the always already male-to-female look, then the very circulatory system of patriarchy, which guarantees its functioning, gets jammed. The veil announces a withdrawal from an economy that basically founds human subjectivity as we know it,and experience it, rendering the effects of the mirror into impenetrable opaqueness. It disables recognition and, therefore, mis-recognition. It, at the same time, and ironically, invites another kind of look that bounces back to the Western looker (in disapproval, or even horror), perhaps calling attention to the naturalization of an economy that should be "absurd" (similar to the possible effects of camp vis-a-vis the feminine masquerade). Of course the niqab usually means more than just this perhaps ancillary, perhaps accidental, symbolic intervention. If we think of the veil as a feminist refusal, accidental or not, we may be able to see through the self-righteous rhetoric of "equality" and join Luce Irigaray in asking: "Equal to whom?"